Real Estate Market Update Nov 21, 2023: Good Housing News, Bad Economy News, & Homes.com good or bad?

Mike Mills (00:00:08) - Howdy, Texas Realtors and Happy Thanksgiving! I know many of you have your hands full with family gatherings and kids being out of school, messing up the house all day, but I'm thrilled to have you join us for the Texas Real Estate and Finance Podcast. Weekly Real Estate Market Update for November the 21st. I'm your host, Mike Mills, a local mortgage banker here in the Dallas-Fort Worth metroplex with over 13 years of experience in the industry and having worked with top agents across the state, I've encountered just about every scenario you can imagine. I've distilled that wealth of experience into a weekly show that keeps you informed about the ever evolving real estate landscape, and equips you with the knowledge to navigate it as a realtor. Now, I try my best to keep these episodes short and concise, hopefully 20 minutes or less. But I talk a lot. And when record these, I don't often know the final link until I'm done editing, so please bear with me in my constant brain dumping. Nevertheless, I hope you'll make it a habit to join me every Tuesday for this market update.

Mike Mills (00:01:01) - It's the perfect way to kick start your week and ensure you're well prepared for the dynamic world of real estate. Consider me your trusty guide through the ever shifting terrain of our industry, and here's what we have on tap for today's episode. So first off, I actually have some good news as it relates to housing, which is a nice change from the normal Debbie Downer data I have to bring you every week. But with good news and housing often comes a little bad news for our economy as a whole. We'll talk about bank layoffs, the weakening US consumer, and even though inflation is coming down, things are still really expensive. I'm going to let you know if the fed decides to raise rates again in December, where some big job layoffs are starting to come from, why Walmart is a little concerned about the US consumer. And if you haven't heard about homes, why you need to know who they are and what they're doing. Is it good or is it bad for our business? I will try and answer that question, and at the very end, I'm going to tell you what you need to be doing right now to prepare for the new era of real estate that's coming upon us really quickly.

Mike Mills (00:01:54) - You have to be prepared or you'll get left behind. I'm not being Chicken Little here, but we have to prepare for the worst and hope for the best. Now, before we dive into the good stuff, I want to ask a favor. If you're finding these insights as enjoyable as a slice of pecan pie on Thanksgiving, is it pecan or pecan? I guess depends on where you're from. Then why not join the party? Hit that subscribe button on your podcast platform and become a part of our ever growing, fabulous community of real estate aficionados. Think of it like this. Every new person that joins our ranks helps fuel my podcasting passion. Maybe that's good. Maybe that's bad. You see, with each edition, I get to whip up even more fantastic episodes each week, chock full of the latest and greatest insights to supercharge your real estate business. So if you'd be so kind as to help a fella out, show me some love by liking, commenting, subscribing, sharing and if you really love it, dropping me a review.

Mike Mills (00:02:40) - I can't express enough how I appreciate each and every one of you for tuning in week after week. Let's make this journey together even more enjoyable and exciting. Now let's get on with the show! So lately I've said it a lot like Roz from Monsters, Inc. Here's all the bad news and real estate this week.

Mike Mills (00:02:54) - I hope it doesn't make you turn off the channel.

Mike Mills (00:02:57) - But that was probably a terrible impression. But. But this week we actually got some positive signs that show our market might be starting to turn around a little, at least for real estate. So first off, housing starts are actually up from this time last year. You see, single family permits are up 14% year over year okay. That's 14%. That's a big growth. That's good. Now it's still less than household formations, but we're headed in the right direction. Maybe we'll get a little relief for this inventory stuff. But just because starts are up doesn't mean they'll get executed. They have six months to execute those permits or they expire.

Mike Mills (00:03:26) - But new builds are doing really, really well. You see, big builders are trying to gain market share right now. While the majority of purchases on properties or new homes, because of the lack of inventory on preexisting homes, you see, is when rates start to fall, then you'll start to see mortgage applications go up, just like we discussed before, about how when rates fall, demand is going to go up. And right now new builders are just throwing money at the consumer with incentives. So this competition and demand helps with new builders wanting to create more inventory. But it's not cheap inventory. It's still really expensive. And oh, by the way, their profit margins are the highest they've ever been. Right now they're running between 25 and 35%, depending on what builder you're talking about, which is why they can afford to throw thousands of dollars to the consumer. So you're paying a lot more for the house, but you're getting incentives to buy, I guess. I don't know, I guess that's a good thing.

Mike Mills (00:04:08) - Last week, rates went down from 7.75 all the way down to 7.375 on average in a week, which is a really, really big move. And during that week, purchase applications jumped almost 5% in one week, which again, rates go down, demand goes up and rates are trending down for the third week in a row. And right now you're starting to see a tick up in price reductions on properties that are currently listing. But that is kind of normal for this time of year. When you look at seasonality and you look at Thanksgiving holidays and Christmas holidays and New Years, you start to see homes that sit on the market a little bit longer and you'll see the prices come down some. It's not dramatic, but they are coming down a little bit. But remember, as the rates continue to tick down, so will the demand. And then you'll start to see those price adjustments go away. Right now the time on market is still less than pre-pandemic levels. So homes are sitting a little bit longer right now, but they're still not sitting as long as they did before the pandemic.

Mike Mills (00:04:55) - And right now, the median price on a home is $430,000. And. That is higher than last year at this exact same time. Overall, we're about 1 to 3% above last year, depending on what metric you use to measure it. But also almost 40% of homeowners currently are mortgage free. This is an all time high. Now, most of these are baby boomers who refinance when rates were really low. But that's still a positive trend, which means that if home prices do adjust because people don't owe as much on their house compared to the equity they have, there might be some wiggle room to make a little bit of negotiations to either get the price down, or maybe even help you pay for some closing costs. And last week, PPI inflation fell to 1.3%, which was below the 1.9% expectation that people had forecasted. Now, core PPI fell down to 2.4% below the 2.7% that was expected. And just so you know, PPI is what producers are paying for goods to produce whatever it is they're producing.

Mike Mills (00:05:46) - So if you're making tennis shoes, what are you paying for? The rubber. What are you paying for the fabric to create the two strings. Whatever. So this is actually what producers are playing, which can be an indication on where inflation will be headed in the future because the producers are paying less than. Ideally, you would think the consumer would also be paying less down in the near future. And because of inflation starting to come down, the CME Fed Watch tool forecast that right now there is a 0% chance of a rate hike in December, and many are expecting rate cuts to come in May of 2024 or maybe even later, possibly May, possibly June. But as it stands right now, the entire market is expecting that there will be no more rate cuts, that we've kind of reached the peak of where the where the fed wants to raise rates, and from here it'll just be how long they pause before they start to cut rates. And when the fed starts cutting rates more than likely quantitative tightening, which is what they've been doing about selling off mortgage backed securities, which directly affects mortgage rates.

Mike Mills (00:06:39) - That will most likely stop as well. But right now, the fed balance sheet, all the mortgage bonds that they currently own, along with other bonds is still really high, so they still want to run off quite a bit of that, which is why you might see a pause on rate hikes for a while before they start actually doing rate cuts. And even though CPI inflation, which is the consumer price index, okay, even though that inflation is currently at 3.2%, okay, not close to the target of 2%, which are trying to get to costs overall are still pretty high for many necessities. So right now, car insurance alone is up 19.2% from last year. Car repairs are almost up 10% from last year. Transportation, overall buses, public transportation, flying all of that is up almost 10% from last year. Rent inflation, how much it costs you to rent versus how much it cost last year is up 7% and food away from home meaning not groceries, but dining out is up 5.5%. Now, part of the reason that inflation is coming down and rates are coming down is because the economy is not doing so hot overall.

Mike Mills (00:07:36) - So even though we're starting to see some benefits in the real estate market, that generally means like we've talked about many times, that when the economy starts to suffer, that's when you'll start to see mortgage rates come down. That's when you start to see housing prices come down, because demand might even be a little bit less, even with lower rates. But until we have a bigger supply of homes available, you're probably not going to see prices come down as rates do, because the demand will still be strong enough to to keep prices at their current levels. If not, raise them. But speaking of the economy not doing so hot. So initial jobless claims are going to come out on Wednesday this week. So tomorrow after you're listening to this, and right now people are still getting laid off at a higher rate. And it's climbing than where we were from last year. Now we're still historically low when you look at it across the last, say, 50 years. But right now people are getting laid off and they're staying laid off.

Mike Mills (00:08:24) - So they're staying on unemployment and on these, these social programs a little bit longer than they normally do, because after they lose their job, it's becoming that much more difficult to find another job. As a matter of fact, Citigroup, one of the largest banks in the world, plans to announce major layoffs this week. It's expected to be in the tens of thousands as of recording this. Right now, they've already restructured. I think it was somewhere between 500 and 1000 of their upper level management pieces. So this could be a massive effect that affects the banking industry as a whole when you see these big layoffs occur. And speaking of banking, Moody's, the credit rating agency that downgraded the US credit rating last week, just downgraded three of the country's largest banks. This week, Bank of America, Chase and Wells Fargo all went from being rated as stable to negative. So what does that mean for banking cities laying people off? Moody's is downgrading the big banks current credit rating. It doesn't bode well for banking.

Mike Mills (00:09:16) - And last week Walmart okay their stocks fell 8%. 8% is a big drop in a day after the CEO of Walmart stated that based on their October trends, it's really made them take a pause and rethink the health of the US consumer. Okay, Walmart is saying this now. If you ever look at investors like Warren Buffett's a big one on this, he always talks about in times of recession, investing in things that are kind of staples, which is why he invests in Coca-Cola. He invests in some banking stocks, even though those fluctuate during times of recession. But but Walmart is another big player. Things that, you know, dollar stores. These are things that people people are still going to have to buy goods, they're still going to have to go places and purchase things. So usually you look at those cheaper outlets that are going to tend. To do well when the economy is suffering because they can't just not have toilet paper and water and everything else. So you'll start to see Walmart, you know, the dollar store.

Mike Mills (00:10:07) - These type of places start to improve and their sales to uptick a little bit, because maybe people aren't going to target and they're moving. They're spending their dollars somewhere that's a little less expensive. So when Walmart comes out and says they're they're really looking at the strength of the US consumer and being concerned about it, you might want to pay attention because, you know, they're on the lower end of who's least ones that need to be affected by a receding economy. And if they're starting to feel the effects, then it can't be too great. And if you want to know why, Walmart is probably feeling this way. So auto loans hit a record high 10% interest last week for new cars. They also hit 14% on average for used cars. And this is, by the way, usually with good credit credit cards right now on average right 25% interest. So if you have a $10,000 balance on your credit card, you're paying 25% interest every single month. And they did a study that said, if you wanted to buy a home, a car and pay off your student loans right now, it would cost you $4,250 per month on average.

Mike Mills (00:11:03) - That's $51,000 a year, or 70% of the median, the median pretax pretax household income. So before you get taxes off that's pre tax. You're at 70%. If you're paying 4250 a month for those things. That's just a house a car and student loans. That's it. That's not food gas, groceries any of those other things. So things are very expensive even though inflation is coming down. All that means is that the rate at which prices are increasing is slowing. It's not that it's receding. And going back to where the prices were before the pandemic, we're still well above that and don't see that coming down anytime soon. So when you see the news about inflation, it doesn't mean things are getting cheaper. It just means that they're getting they're getting more expensive, less fast. I guess the best way to put it. So things are really, really expensive. And this puts a big stress on the US economy. And a lot of these things you don't feel for months or even years. Sometimes it takes a while for this stuff to filter through.

Mike Mills (00:11:58) - So housing is doing well or doing better I should say. Well is a strong word. Definitely doing better. Rates are coming down, houses are some of the prices are being adjusted a little bit better. Some of that's due to seasonality. The economy as a whole isn't necessarily doing great, but it's and it's definitely trending probably in the wrong direction. But if you're on the you know, if you're on the side of the fence that wants mortgage rates to come down, well, then, you know, maybe you're cheering for the economy to take a little dive. Nobody wants to have anybody feel any kind of pain. But unfortunately, that's how this cyclical style of marketing works. But, you know, the economy suffering a little bit is good for housing and interest rates, but it's not good for the average American. So we're you know, we're kind of always stuck in this little middle ground. Of which one are we rooting for. But now I want to get into a topic about a company called CoStar.

Mike Mills (00:12:43) - Okay. Now, if you listen to my podcast that I did last week with Amy Cornell, we actually dove into this quite a bit. So if you haven't heard that one, I would definitely go back and listen to it. It's about Nar and what the impacts are going to be to your real estate commissions, and I'm not going to get into all that here because it's too long to fit into hopefully 20 minutes. Like I said earlier. But I do want to call attention to this company called homes. This is what the CoStar, the parent company of homes, is CoStar and Amy and I were talking about on the podcast last week before this story even came out. We were talking about homes and how they it got. We got the strong impression that they were positioning themselves after this lawsuit to kind of put themselves in a place where they could be like a national MLS, because what you're going to see from this lawsuit most likely is diminishing demand for local MLS. I don't think that's a good thing, but I do think that that's probably what's going to start to happen for many, many reasons, which again, you can go listen to the podcast and it'll tell you.

Mike Mills (00:13:38) - But homes currently is trying to position themselves to fill that void. Well, in our podcast, we kind of speculated on the fact that whenever you have big class action lawsuits like this kind of thing, there's usually somebody or some entity behind it driving it, whether it be reaching out to people to encourage them to file a lawsuit by sending out mailers or advertising or whatever. But somebody has a benefit in this. And at the time last week, we were kind of speculating that maybe homes, because they had really been on a marketing blitz since all this happened, was maybe a little bit behind this because they were the one that was most benefited from this. So on that note, this week, the CEO of CoStar that owns homes came out and said they had to make a statement, and they said they had nothing to do with the funding of the commission lawsuits. So the CEO came out and made that blanket statement that they had nothing to do with the funding of the lawsuit. So if you're having to come out and say that, you know, maybe not, maybe they didn't have anything to do with it, or maybe they're trying to cover their tracks a little bit.

Mike Mills (00:14:34) - But this was thought because they are striving, like I said, to become a national MLS and take the place of all the local MLS. So a recent report released by a company called KBW, a large investment tracking firm, showed that CoStar would be the biggest beneficiary of this particular Nar ruling is just a company that evaluates the market and tries to predict goodbyes for future investment, so they don't have any skin in the game. On whether or not. They're on the realtor side or the or the buyer's side or anything like that. Okay. All they're trying to do is help their investment, help their investors make good picks for their money based on what's happening in the market. That's it. And in this report, they said that the likelihood of a shared commission ban, okay, a ban, not a limitation, but an actual ban on shared commissions, they put it at 50% from the Sits or Burnette trial, and they put it at 75%. If the same result comes from the Mueller trial, which is happening right now.

Mike Mills (00:15:28) - So they're saying it's a 50 to 75% chance that shared commissions between sellers and buyers gets banned. And they also said in that report, if that happens, then the agent count as a whole would decrease dramatically in the case of a ruling like that. So they're saying that if those commission ban, if that commission ban occurs, then the likelihood that the decrease in the number of agents in the market would be dramatic, because what they said in the report was that analysts found that in the US, the top 20% of agents are responsible for 80 to 90% of transactions, so 20% of agents are doing 80 to 90% of the transactions, while the top 10% are responsible for almost two thirds of all transactions that occur. So the top 10% are basically accounting for 75% of the market transaction. This is going to tip the power balance towards the selling agents, and the report suggests that the agent count in the US could theoretically decline by approximately 300,000 to 600,000 over time, or 60 to 80% based on current Nar membership of 1.6 million.

Mike Mills (00:16:33) - So 60 to 80% of agents buy this company. That does not care what happens one way or another, but based on what they're reading, they think that if things happen the way it looks like they're going to happen, that we could lose 60 to 80% of realtors in the business. And oh, by the way, guess who would be there to pick up the pieces? Well, that would be homes. And what their hook is right now is that if you're a listing agent and you list your house on homes, then any lead or any buyer from what I understand that clicks on your listing and finds wants to find more information that lead becomes your lead as the listing agent, so it does not get sold off to other agents like Zillow does. So they're changing the model. Now. Next week I'm going to I'm going to take this week during Thanksgiving and I'm going to do a little bit deeper dive. My wife's a realtor. We're going to sign up for homes. And I want to see what they're offering and what the gimmick is or what the hook is.

Mike Mills (00:17:22) - And my hope is by next week, this market update, I'll be able to give a full report on what they're offering and what I think. Is it a scam? Is it are they trying to put you out of business? Like what are the impacts of this. So I'm going to try to do a pretty deep dive into what homes offers for next week. Because right now, I don't know. I have no idea. They could be good. It could be helpful. It could be bad. They couldn't be. Maybe they're not behind the commission lawsuit. Maybe they are. I mean, only time will tell from some of this stuff, but I really want to dive into and see what they're offering because they're definitely trying to position themselves to be the benefactors. When the market starts to shift. You see, the thing that sucks about all this is that right now, Realtors and MLS are under attack and they are being villainized by the media. Okay? They're making you as the realtor out to be the bad guy and to why homes have become so affordable.

Mike Mills (00:18:06) - That's what they're using to push you out of the market. They're not blaming cheap money from the fed that drove up asset prices to levels we've never seen in such a very short amount of time. They're not currently blaming new home builders, profit margins, or the fact that they are purposefully, slowly building up inventory so as not to lose the amount of demand and drive the prices of homes down because they love their 30% profit margins. And they're not blaming local or state governments for putting so many restrictions and regulations that the small builder who might want to come in and build affordable housing can't, because the amount of money and time to get into the game is so unaffordable for for the smaller builders that they can't even participate in the game. They're not blaming blaming the jacked up interest rates because rates were so cheap for so long that the feds had to overcorrect, and now rates have shot up to, you know, unaffordable levels that we've ever seen before. And I know rates were at 18% at one time, but they weren't at 18% with a $400,000 house.

Mike Mills (00:18:59) - They were at 18% with a $70,000 house. That's a completely different thing. They're not blaming that on why housing so and unaffordable. They're not blaming the large venture capitalists or hedge funds that are buying up swaths of real estate all over the country and turning them into rentals. No, they are blaming you, the local real estate agent, closing a dealer to a month on average, and often scraping by just to make ends meet and feed your family. You and your commissions are the reason that housing is so expensive, according to the national media and according to all the consumers that seem to be driving and blaming you. And we all know that that's complete and total bullshit. And unfortunately, the lawsuits are going to continue to come and agents and brokers will continue to be named. So be very careful about what you say and do out there right now, at least until we get some kind of actual clarification on what actually you can or can't do and what will or won't be allowed going forward in real estate, either by the state governments or local governments or the Supreme Court.

Mike Mills (00:19:54) - Whatever it is, we have to have some kind of guidance that is going to come. My expectation is that we'll. We have some sort of actual written out judgment on the Burnett case in particular, probably sometime around the first of the year. And that's going to set precedent for all these other lawsuits that follow, but it's going to affect how real estate is transacted and how commissions are paid between buyers and sellers agents. I mean, just last week, a lawsuit in Texas was filed by a builder and a venture capital company against local MLS in Dallas, Metro Texas, Houston, Austin and San Antonio, along with a few small brokerages and at least one agent. And I got news for you it's not going to be the last one. Fintech and big money are coming for your business, and right now they smell blood in the water. So if you want to survive, you have to be ready to adapt and educate your clients about what you do and why it's so valuable. Or you might be one of the 300 to 600,000 agents that they're predicting to leave the business next year, and nobody wants that.

Mike Mills (00:20:48) - How are you going to prepare for all these changes coming? That's the question you have to ask yourself. And you have to be serious about that question. You have to sit down and think, what am I going to do? What is my plan for 2024? If I love and I'm passionate about this business and I do not intend to get out of it, what are you going to do differently that's going to set you apart from everybody else? Because you can't just stick your head in the sand and just hope this all goes away. Because like I said in the beginning, if it does and we go back to business as usual, I don't think that's going to happen. But if it does, great, then you just keep doing what you've always done and things will be fine. But if it doesn't, which right now seems to be more headed in that direction, then you need to be prepared. And the longer you wait to prepare yourself, and the more you just wait for things to happen or happen to you.

Mike Mills (00:21:29) - And don't be proactive about it, the less likely you're going to have success in this market. You see, it's going to be business as usual for a while, and especially in a down market like this, where transactions aren't happening by the dozens and buyers are actually a little bit more in control than they have been in a while, which means buyers agents are going to have a little bit more control than they have for a while. You're probably not going to see a dramatic shift, but once that ruling comes out and they actually make a judgment on it, there may be appeals, but once some direction is given, okay, then questions. If they haven't started already, questions are going to start popping up from your buyers and sellers, and you need to know how to answer those questions. And because real estate is competitive, there will be agents that will try to start getting ahead of any potential rulings and possibly cutting their commissions now and advertising that out there. So when that happens and you don't want to cut your value, which I don't think you should, how are you going to address those questions? You see, when business is slower and and people have to pay their bills, there will be agents out there that start to get desperate and cut their cost of doing the work before they quit.

Mike Mills (00:22:24) - Now realtors are not going away or real estate agents are not going away. It's going to be bumpy for a little bit. And lots of questions and unknowns that are working against this right now are out in the market that we don't know how it's going to play out, but people will continue to buy and sell homes, and agents will continue to be part of that process. That is not going to change now what the job looks like going forward, what kind of work you have to do as a listing agent or a buyer's agent, and how you get compensated for it. That's going to be the question. And that's the thing that's most likely going to change. Look, we all know like Redfin is a great example. They've offered for years sellers to pay $500 or 1% commission to sell their house and listen on Redfin and they've had that available for, you know, ten years at least, or however long they've been in around and they've had little to no success and no traction with it, because real estate is a complicated transaction that people only do a couple of times in their life, so they can spend hours on YouTube and not know every bit of a contract.

Mike Mills (00:23:16) - If I'm a seller, I don't know how to discern between ten different offers which offer this. One has more money, but this one's asking me for a more closing cost. They don't know how to discern between that without having to really get out there and educate themselves. And you know, it's just like anything else, they can find a YouTube video and watch it, or they can find something online and read it, but that doesn't mean they're going to understand all the intricacies of it. So you can't just immediately replace real estate agents with fintech companies or with flat fees. Now, maybe ten years down the road, it might look a little different, but agents will always be involved. What you have to understand is that you can't ignore the fact that buyers and sellers are going to start asking questions, and you have to come up with a strategy on how you're going to answer them and be ready to answer them when they do come up. And not only do you need to have your answers dialed in to your value proposition, what you offer, what kind of work you do, and why it's important.

Mike Mills (00:24:02) - But if you want to be ready for 24 2024, you need to start planning what that's going to look like right now. You've got Thanksgiving and Christmas to get your stuff together and figure out how you're going to make sure that you make all your bills and your ends meet next year by selling real estate. So what does that look like? Well, first thing you have to ask yourself is you need to know your numbers. Okay. What are your numbers? How many sales did you do last year? How many contracts did you close? You need to know that. What was your gross commission from each contract and what did you net from that contract? What did you actually get paid after you paid your broker fees and everything else? Of all those contracts, how many people were buyers and how many people were sellers and where did they come from? Did they come from your sphere? Did they come from open houses? Did they come from social media? How did you get your contacts and what was your average purchase price? What was the average contract that you sold? Was it 300,000? Was it 350? These are numbers that you need to know.

Mike Mills (00:24:49) - Then once you have all that together, you have to start putting your plan together for 2024. You have to look back on your history first and know what you did and know those numbers so you can plan for what you need to. Do for this year and how to get there. So how many contracts do I need this year to meet my income goal? I knew my contracts and what I did last year, and I knew what it paid me. How many of those do I need to get to make my income go? Do I need to anticipate a shift in the numbers of buyers that I serve and the numbers of sellers based on what's happening in the market right now, and how do I plan accordingly for that? And based on where you got your business in 2023, whether it be your data base, social media, open houses, your sphere, whatever it is, how many contacts or leads or conversations do you need to have each week to make sure that you hit those numbers to reach your income goal? Because you have to know how many people you have to talk to in order for that number to turn into one contract or one deal, because you can't work your way up to your goal without knowing how many people you need to speak to.

Mike Mills (00:25:43) - And then once you know that, how do you plan your week, your day, your month to make sure that you get those contracts and touches in each week to hit your goal? Because setting the goal is one thing. I want to make $200,000 next year. Well, that's great, but how are you going to do that? What are the activities you're going to do? What are the processes that you're going to put into your daily activities? They're going to help you reach those goals. Do you have you written them out? Do you have a plan? Are you scattered or are you focused? These are all questions that you have to ask yourself to get ready for next year. And you've got about a month and a half to do this. And then when you look at your marketing, you need to ask yourself, what activities did I do that yielded me the most benefit in getting buyers and sellers? And what should I focus in on or dial in on to take that to the next level for this year? So do you want to become a master at hosting open houses? Do you want to start making videos to educate buyers on social media, buyers and sellers on how the market is currently and how they buy and sell homes? Do you want to really focus in on building your database through your sphere in mind at every day, and make contacts and text people and call people and reach out on social media and connect with people on a day to day basis.

Mike Mills (00:26:44) - Go to lunch, go to coffee, go to events. You know, if you're really a sphere worker, what does that look like? You can't just say, well, I work my sphere. Okay, great. What does that mean? Like, are you texting people or are you calling people? Are you methodical and are you deliberate about your activities? Or you just let the day determine what you're going to do and just hope it works out? Fingers crossed. And then, believe it or not, a lot of people don't want to hear this. But you have to figure out what are you going to do to take care of yourself. People put themselves at a lower end of the spectrum on priorities. They'll make sure that they get their work done for the day. They'll make sure that they take their kids and do what they need to do. And when they get home, they're exhausted. Tired. They don't have any energy. They don't have the mind to sit down and read a book or, or figure out what they're going to plan for the next day because they're exhausted, because they don't take care of their body.

Mike Mills (00:27:27) - This has to be something that's a that's a monumental, important thing for you because your brain does not work correctly if your body is not working correctly. So what does that mean? Well, what are you doing from a physical and mental standpoint to make sure that your brain is in the right place every day to accomplish all your daily goals and activities? Are you eating right? Are you getting at least a little bit of exercise so your body and your blood can keep flowing? Are you continually educating yourself on a weekly basis to get better and better each week? At what you do, you have to be knowledgeable on your industry and you have to know what's affecting buyers and sellers. So you can speak to it in an informed way that positions you as the expert in all things real estate to your sphere and anybody that works with you. Because if you don't have a plan in mind or in place right now, you need to start getting it together immediately. You cannot just cross your fingers and hope that it all works out.

Mike Mills (00:28:16) - You have to go about it like a business you run because that's what you're doing. You're running a business and not like a hobby that you just occasionally do for fun. Or you might be finding a whole new hobby to do in a few months. Look, real estate is changing whether you like it or not, and you have to start planning for that now, or you risk being left behind. Right now, a lot of people think that a million agents are going to leave the business by the end of next year. Are you going to be one of them? You don't have to be, but it is completely up to you. All right. That was a lot. Sorry. But with that, we are done for today. And I want to leave you with another quote from the great and wise Winston Churchill. Winston Churchill said, success is not final, failure is not fatal. It's the courage to continue that counts. And as we wrap up, I want to extend my warmest Thanksgiving wishes to all of you.

Mike Mills (00:29:01) - May you have a joyful and gratitude filled holiday with your loved one and this ever shifting world of real estate. Your potential for greatness is completely up to you. And no matter what comes your way, as long as you're able to get up in the morning and keep moving, you have the ability to win. It's always up to you. Until next week. Stay inspired. Keep your spirits high, be a good human and let's conquer this Texas real estate landscape together. See?